Saturday, August 27, 2016

Trump: The Great Flip Flop

It is never the flip that gets a politician in trouble. It is the flop. People are entitled to change their mind. But once they have changed their mind, flopping back to their original position seems like rank opportunism.

Until he ran for President of the United States, Donald Trump supported the Chamber of Commerce’s open borders position. In 2012, while supporting Mitt Romney, Donald Trump still criticized the then Republican nominee for having too harsh and uncaring an immigration policy.

Trump has, in the past, bragged about hiring immigrants and has taken the position that illegal immigrants should not be rounded up and sent packing. In fact, Trump once supported the DREAM Act and believed illegal aliens who are children should be allowed to stay in the United States. That was all before he started his 2016 campaign and declared Mexicans rapists.

Once he got in the race, Trump declared he would round up all 11 million illegal aliens in the country and send them packing. When reporters pressed him on the outrage his plan generated, he said the nation had “become so politically correct as a country that we can’t even walk. We can’t think properly. We can’t do anything.”

“We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out, they will come back, some will come back, the best, through a process … it may not be a very quick process, but I think that’s very fair and very fine,” Trump declared in a late February debate against Rubio and Cruz.

In March, confronted by NPR’s Cokie Roberts about his immigration plan, Trump said, “I talk about deporting people that are here illegally….We have a country or we don’t.”

On Trump’s website, he calls for tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) officers to round up the 11 million illegal aliens in the country. “Millions of people come to the United States but refuse to leave, without consequence,” Trump declared on his website. “This is a threat to national security. Individuals who refuse to leave at the time their visa expires should be subject to criminal penalties.”